Multilingual Value Formats in SSRS

SSRS renders DateTime and floating-point values according a given Culture depending on

• the Language definition of the report
• the browser’s language settings
• URL parameters
• the current day of week (and whether DST applies or not)

as stated in this TechNet article.

This is all a bit unreliable for my taste, so I looked for a more deterministic method to generate my reports. (I need to add that the reports I am working on already required a “language” parameter, since the data is stored in several languages, and the language parameter is needed to generate the correct data set.)

Solution 1: add a CultureInfo parameter

I added a text parameter name CultureInfo to the .rdl that requires the user to input a CultureInfo value (such as en-us, or de-de, etc.). For this CultureInfo value to be used as default format provider for the report, we need to assign the report’s Language property:

• select the report by clicking outside the page area in designer mode
• go to the property sheet, select “Language”
• click the dropdown button, select “<Expression…>”
• enter “=Parameters!CultureInfo.Value”

When previewing or running the modified report, the CultureInfo parameter needs to be set, and datetime and float values are displayed according to the culture’s formats.